Dick Morris: End to Wisconsin Turmoil Near

Veteran political analyst and best-selling author Dick Morris says he sees an end in sight to the political turmoil that has gripped Wisconsin for weeks and that his new book, published this week, predicted and supports the governors’ revolution spreading across the United States, which is curtailing public-employee unions and promoting education reform.

“Once the [Wisconsin] governor has to actually start to lay off people, because the senators won’t come back and pass the cuts that are necessary — and refinance the bonds that are necessary to be refinanced — he will be able to stand up and say: ‘These are 100 people who have lost their jobs,’ because these guys [the senators] haven’t come back,” Morris, author of "Revolt! How to Defeat Obama and Repeal His Socialist Programs," said Wednesday on Fox News. Host Bill O’Reilly asked Morris why Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has not yet taken any such action.

“Because he doesn’t have to yet, if he starts doing it just because there is a threat, people will say: ‘You are just ratcheting this up.’ But when the numbers dictate that he has to, which will come in a few days, they are going to have to come back,” Morris said, adding that he sees the situation resolving itself next week and “he wins, they lose.”

“The important thing to understand about this, that nobody is talking about — and Walker is not talking about — is he talks about ‘I only want wages on the table when I do collective bargaining,’” Morris said.

“Well, the other step he is sweeping off the table, is largely very popular education reforms, that the union is blocking, and if he restricts collective bargaining to wages and benefits, he can go ahead and implement [them]: like teacher-tenure reform; like if there are layoffs, laying them off in order of merit, not based on seniority; merit pay.

“In other words, he needs to say what he is for, that he is for those reforms rather than just what he is against,” he said.

O’Reilly brings up former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and how President Barack Obama recently complimented his state’s healthcare reform. Morris said he would like to address what he thinks Obama was doing.

“He knows this law [Obamacare] is going to be thrown out by the courts because it is not interstate commerce . . . so he wants the liberal Democratic states to pass the state equivalents of his bill, because at the state level it is constitutional,” Morris said. “So what he is doing now — as a ‘show of flexibility’ — he is trying to [pass] the national law onto the states, so that it survives the constitutional muster.”

And with regard to Romney: Romneycare is “not his Achilles' heel, but his Achilles’ body,” Morris said.

“There is no way this guy is going to get nominated, with his passing the equivalent of Obamacare,” he said. “The party is never going to nominate someone who is soft on this issue.”

Turning to his new book, “How to Defeat Obama and Repeal His Socialist Programs,” Morris said it focuses on “how you get from here to there.”

“How do you get from the victories of 2010, with governors and state legislatures, to defeating Obama and repealing his programs,” he said. “And it explains step-by-step what we have to do — we meaning the Republicans — to get rid of Obamacare, get rid of all of all of his programs, roll back his spending, cut back his deficit, and defeat him.”

In his book , co-authored with Eileen McGann, Morris writes a “perfect storm” is coming as a cutoff of federal subsidies, reduced tax revenues, and newly elected Republican governors and state legislatures demand union reforms.

Morris and McGann urge Congress to make Medicaid payments block grants, and turn its enforcement over to the states. Medicaid has doubled in the past five years. Roll its cost back to 2008 levels, they urge, and let the states have total flexibility to structure the eligibility and benefits as they wish.

Veteran political analyst and best-selling author Dick Morris says he sees an end in sight to the political turmoil that has gripped Wisconsin for weeks and that his new book, published this week, predicted and supports the governors revolution spreading across the United...